Feather Image Edges

[shelbirenea]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a custom shape with an image, and the. feather the edges, but for some reason no matter what steps I try following, I can't get any blur effect to apply only to the edges and I can't get the image edges to feather, in general. I could entirely not be doing something correctly, or maybe there's a setting somewhere that I'm missing. I am trying to complete this in a timely manner, I'm working on a time sensitive project, so I'm hoping someone sees this and can help me out. 

[John T Smith]

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[shelbirenea]

My apologies. I'm using Photoshop.

[Conrad_C]

The image you posted shows a photo with a vignette (the feathered black edge). Is that what you’re after? Or (I am guessing here) do you not want the black and only want to fade out the image edge itself as a circle? If my guess is correct, what you can do is add a circular mask and feather that, as shown in the demo below. It would take only a few seconds.

The point of the demo is that when a layer mask exists, the Masks section of the Properties panel offers a Feather control that you can drag to adjust. So there’s no need to set up any kind of blur effect.

After you’re done, you can either export this with a transparent background by using a file format that supports transparency (such as PNG), or you can add a new background as another layer behind the image.

Some will teach this technique by drawing a circular selection with the Elliptical Marquee tool and making a pixel mask out of that, but I don’t like that way because it’s more difficult to edit the circle later. If you draw it as a vector path and make a vector mask as shown here, it’s easy and fast to move and resize the circle using handles.

(Sorry about the blue colors getting posterized in the demo…the Adobe forum software doesn’t always preserve the quality of uploaded GIF animations even though I already compressed it)